Written by Emily Catherine Hughes   

Three weeks into my freshman year of college — on the morning of Friday the thirteenth — I woke up in the emergency room in vomit-soaked clothing with no memory of how I got there.

The previous night had been spent in my dorm, playing Kings with cheap beer and Smirnoff with a group of hallmates in celebration of our buddy’s eighteenth birthday. Peacocking despite my negligible precollege drinking experience, I downed four beers and an indeterminable number of shots.

I don’t remember leaving the building or coming back. I do recall feeling “exuberantly dizzy” as I walked a friend back to his dorm before returning to my own.

I blacked out to find myself throwing up, horizontal on the floor of the dorm showers, with my RA and black-clad emergency rescue personnel standing over me.

My nausea eclipsed any semblance of self-consciousness as my body violently rejected the liquor I’d cavalierly thrown back earlier in the night. It was like when pregnant women shit during delivery — I was past caring that I lay immobile and incoherent, so sick I wanted to die, as cluster of paramedics blurred around my periphery. It was, factually and figuratively, a low point.

My mom swam to the forefront of my mind before I faded from consciousness entirely.

At 5:45 a.m., I awoke again, this time in a hospital bed attached to an IV, shivering and saturated in my own body fluids; I’m certain I had pissed myself. The man attending me when I woke up informed me that my friends — I didn’t know who — were coming to pick me up.

The friends to whom he was referring turned out to be two sophomores, one from the night before, who drove me back to campus from the regional hospital. I left holding a printout with my bill and diagnosis: ALCOHOL INTOXICATION.

My hallmates graciously asked how I was feeling after I made the walk of shame back up to the fourth floor to peel off my soggy, rancid clothes and process the night’s events in the shower.

I was advised to let my parents know what had happened before the school did. My mom cried. After hanging up the phone with her in my dorm room, I cried on my bed for half an hour; guilt-stricken, sobbing, with my head on the pillow.

The remainder of that weekend was spent apologizing, piecing back together what had happened from various witnesses coupled with my own narrow recollections, and trying to figure out how to proceed.

“There are a lot of ‘I think’s ‘I believe’s and ‘I remember’s,” I wrote when recounting the episode in a diary entry. “Little certainty.”

Thursday night had become a game of fill-in-the-blanks, and now I was being introduced to details the vodka had prevented my brain from encoding: my roommate’s reaction upon discovering me in the bathroom, how I was pulled away on a stretcher and required an ambulance ride to the hospital.

I learned that my stumbling friend whom I’d accompanied back to his residence hall had stayed overnight in a different local hospital in the same state of inebriation.

Two weeks later, I sat before a student conduct panel to determine what action the university would take in response to my indiscretions.

I was put on a two-semester probationary period — deferred suspension, the equivalent of an immediate second strike — made to take an alcohol education course, and given a merciful ten hours of community service dishwashing in a dining hall.

While the most painful fallouts of my alcohol-poisoning charade were shattering my mom’s trust and jeopardizing my student status in school, an unexpected byproduct was that disclosing its details to friends and family spurred them to reciprocate with their own deviant anecdotes.

I’d only experienced a similar interchange once before, after Angela Chasing my hair at sixteen. It was as though my cringe-inducing fuck-up had earned me the knowledge of other people’s blunders.

Nineteen months after what my mom came to refer to as “the incident,” on my high school best friend’s twentieth birthday, her close friend was found unresponsive in their sorority house and died of apparent alcohol poisoning, according to news media outlets.

The same could have happened to me, or to any binge drinker. In the euphoria of recreation, experimentation and lowering one’s inhibitions, many overlook the reality that the consequences of even a singular accidental overindulgence (acute ethyl alcohol intoxication is a form of drug overdose) can be devastating and irreversible. I’d been lucky to evade such an outcome.

Emily Hughes can recite the entire “Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA?” monologue from Good Will Hunting, verbatim, from memory. She also frequently shops at thrift stores, a practice she refers to as “Goodwill hunting.”